Tom Laskawy

A 17-year veteran of both traditional and online media, Tom Laskawy is a founder and executive director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. Tom's long and winding road to food politics writing passed through New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Florence, Italy, and Philadelphia (which has a vibrant progressive food politics and sustainable agriculture scene, thank you very much). In addition to Grist, his writing has appeared online in The American Prospect, Slate, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He is on record as believing that wrecking the planet is a bad idea. Follow him on Twitter.

I have written about the link between wages and obesity before — with wages dropping since the 60s and healthy food prices always going up, people eat more unhealthy food. But now two economists have …

Joining Tom Philpott on the anti-BPA bandwagon, the New York Times columnist Nick Kristof had an op-ed Sunday detailing the mounting evidence against the hormone disrupting chemical. One comment in particular summed up the debate …

HuffingtonPost has a piece up detailing the food lobby’s full court press over a federal soda/sweetener tax: During the first 9 months of 2009, the industry groups stepped up their lobbying in Congress. They have …

I’m sure many of you have seen the various petitions zipping around the Internet encouraging opposition to President Obama’s nomination of pesticide lobbyist Islam “Isi” Siddiqui to the Office of the United State’s Trade Representative. …

Don’t worry about climate change and world hunger–this lady’s got your back!Watching SuperFreakonomics author Steve Levitt sitting next to Jon Stewart as they shook their heads in disbelief that everyone wasn’t on the climate change/geo-engineering …

With the rumors swirling that Michelle Obama is a big fan of former FDA Commissioner David Kessler’s new book The End of Overeating, it seems reasonable to check in on the science behind an “addiction …

SUPER DUPER UNBELIEVEABLE UPDATE: The AP reports that the “Smart Choices” label is taking a break: The Smart Choices nutrition labeling program, created voluntarily by nine large U.S. manufacturers, is halting after federal regulators said …

An update appears at the bottom of the post: The American Academy of Microbiologists (“the world’s oldest and largest life science organization”), just issued a major report on antibiotic resistance which, among many recommendations, calls …